iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 19h

One of my favorite parts of the newspaper.

This is from an ad that runs everyday on page two. Called animal thoughts. Today is titled defend institutions.

"It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of 'our institutions' unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about--a court in newspaper, a law, a labor union--and take it side."

The quote is attributed to Timothy Snyder from "on tyranny" 2017

A project of action for animals Po box 20184 Oakland California 94620

Email afa@mcn.org

Donations appreciated

www.buckingtradition.com

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 30/09/2026

It's always nice to get that Bay Trail north around Moffett and Google.

Bicycle on a trail next to the San Francisco Bay with mountains in the background. Bicycle is standing next to a bench painted as a rainbow. The bench has been tagged "vote blue"

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 28/09/2026

Never expected to be depicted on the cover of The New Yorker!

A blonde guy with glasses struggles to unplug a rack of servers in a data center.

The New Yorker
September 20th 2026
Price $10.99

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 22/09/2026

CW: 🇺🇸 With a bullet fired by our government still in his spine, and no pain medicine, a man is now sleeping on the floor in detention camp. (AP via San Jose Mercury News)

MAN SHOT BY ICE OFFICER
IS DETAINED IN TEXAS

AUSTIN, Texas — A Venezuelan man
shot by a U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement officer was in custody
Monday at an ICE detention center in
Texas after he was released from a hospi-
tal with a bullet still lodged in his back,
the man’s attorney said.

Speaking by phone during a news
conference, Wilber Rafael Garces Perez
said doctors didn’t remove the bullet
because it’s near his spine. He said ICE
pressed for him to be released quickly
from the hospital so it could move him
to a detention center. He said he had
received no pain medication or treat-
ment there, and had slept on the floor,
before eventually being given a “pill”’by
a nurse on Monday. :

Perez, 28, was making a DoorDash
delivery in Austin on Sunday when his
car was “sideswiped” twice by ICE officers in an unmarked truck, immigration attorney Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch
told reporters Monday. He was taken to a hospital, she said, and released by the hospital into ice custody on Sunday.

Perez said ICE officers didn't ask him to stop or turn on any flashing lights until after they had side swiped him.

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 12/09/2026

A rare Saturday afternoon when I have no plans and no idea what I want to do with the time. So I walk downtown in search of adventure. I didn't feel like taking a beer at the pub, but at the local bookstore, I found a book that has been on my list for a few years now, and it's $12 used. [1/2]

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 11/09/2026

THIS parking job features EVERYTHING!! [1/4]

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 10/09/2026

We have broken the climate. The world is on fire. Rivers dry up. Glaciers collapse and destroy towns. I fear for the topsoil. I fear for the famines. I fear for the people. And every new day will bring its Grace and I can enjoy the world for what it is.

A wide shot of fluffy white clouds and a blue sky above a row of redwoods. at the bottom is the line of a grass field and a couple of basketball hoops.

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 10/09/2026

On the plains of the Midwest, there are no mountains in the distance, but most days offer a beautiful cloud show. This year we have gotten some decent clouds out here in Silicon Valley.

Clouds! Fluffy ones. With a row of redwood trees at the bottom.

Same picture zoomed out a bit, so you see the fluffy clouds and the redwood trees and basketball courts on blacktop. We're at a school.

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 28/08/2026

Slack Mobile needs a feature to only allow notifications on mentions, and maybe DMs that are direct between another person and me. (Effectively, a private mention.) Coworkers love to spin up new DM groups every day that trigger a rain of notifications until I mute them.

A screenshot of the slack mobile client settings which gives an option to notify about everything or just mentions and direct messages.

There should be an option for just mentions.

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 28/08/2026

It looks like they took your advice.

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 28/08/2026

I wonder how long it takes Google to get the new boot licked.

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 27/08/2026

The "new" name will surely be adopted by the bootlickers at Google.

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 23/08/2026

A silver lining of AI data centers, apparently, is that they are sabotaging fossil fuel production. Excerpt from "Trump is accidentally aiding a golden age for clean energy" by Mark Gongioff, as published in the San Jose Mercury.

Fossil gas is still relatively
plentiful, cheap and popular.
But demand for gas turbines has
stretched wait times out for years.
And a recent study by Penn State
University engineers, funded in
part by Tesla Inc., found that the
rapid start and stop of Al train-
ing in data centers is wearing out
turbines that were intended for
steadier output, drastically short-
ening their lifespans. Meanwhile,
the first new nuclear facility on
the horizon, Kemmerer Power
Station in Wyoming, isn’t due
to come online until December
2030.

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 22/08/2026

Achievement Unlocked: "I went to Stanford." * * For a couple of hours to visit the transit map exhibit at the David Rumsey Map Library

Danny takes a selfie holding a thumbs up in front of a tower on the Stanford campus.

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 19/08/2026

I am old enough to remember when a news report like this would have been science fiction. Now I live in the early 21st century. What was the Soviet Union is now locked in a war stalemated by robot armies.

Partial news clipping:

The countries are locked in an esca-
lating duel of long-range aerial strikes.
Fighting on the roughly 780-mile front
line in eastern and southern Ukraine is
restricted by large numbers of drones
and ground robots threatening troop
movements, and neither side is making
significant battlefield progress, analysts
say. Officials in Kyiv aim to make the

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 15/08/2026

Via The Week, August 14, 2026

There’s no “magic bullet,” said Francisco Martin Azcarate in

El Pais (Spain). Europe was once a patchwork of managed farm-
lands, with livestock that ate everything that could burn. But
with urbanization, we abandoned the countryside and reforested,
increasing our “exposure to risk” by nestling houses among the
trees. It’s inexcusable, said Barbara Debusschere in De Morgen
(Belgium). If the intelligence services warned us that terrorists
were plotting an attack, and our leaders did nothing, “we would
be white-hot with rage” and drive them out “with tar and feath-
ers.” Yet scientists warned us decades ago that if we kept burn-
ing fossil fuels we would see headlines like “Thousands of Heat
Deaths” and “Power Grid Collapses,” and here we are, having
done nothing to prevent it. We should not normalize a world
where rescue crews come across “the charred bodies of tour-
ists” or find elderly people “dead in sweltering apartments,” yet
we already have. “The most chilling thing about this sweltering
summer is the lack of anger.” We are here because of our leaders’
“criminal negligence”—will we hold them to account?

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 08/08/2026

The silver lining from the US perspective is that China has its own serious problems, especially that so few Chinese want to have children. (Cultural conditioning from the One Child Era multiplied by economic and social precarity. [1/4]

America is not functioning well these
days, but its political system, by design,
gives the public more power to fix prob-
lems—if they choose to fix them. As
Wiattke put it, “The United States has
a knack of going down in flames and
then rejuvenating. China does not.”
The advantage might go to the side
that can face its problems most can-
didly. “You can live in an alternate re-
ality in China, in Russia, or in the
United States,” he said. “That is always
a dangerous proposition, because you
might miss the signals of history com~ 3
ing your way. |

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 08/08/2026

Next: how Trump prompted a surge in Chinese Biotechnology development, bringing them into world leadership, in part by scaring American researchers back to China.

Then tensions with the U.S. exploded.
In 2018, Trump started a trade war, and
his Department of Justice created the
China Initiative, to root out espionage
and trade theft, which targeted more
than a hundred scientists and others of
Chinese descent. In ways that outsid-
ers did not fully appreciate, Trump tipped
the balance of an internal Chinese po-
litical debate. The private sector was as-
cendant, and the influential billionaire
Jack Ma was arguing that a university
education was overrated. “He said, ba-
sically, intellectuals don’t produce any-
thing,” Rao told me. “China's economy
has done well by copying from the West,
so why should we put more funding
into original research? But, once Trump
came in, that side completely collapsed.”
In 2020, the Party’s Central Commit-
tee established “scientific and techno-
logical self-reliance” as a paramount goal,
and last year funding for exploratory
basic research hit a record seven per cent
of the nation’s R. & D. budget.

Early this year, after the Trump Ad-
ministration slashed funding to Amer-
ican federal and academic scientific
studies, the Chinese government an-
nounced another ten-per-cent increase
in funding for science and technology.
China has overtaken both the U.S. and
the European Union in publishing in-
fluential research papers, measured by
how often they are cited by others. Chi-
nese biotech firms now generate nearly
a third of the world’s new drug candi-
dates, almost matching the U.S. “Peo-
ple in Washington are worried that bio-
tech is the next E.V.s,” an American
executive told me. “We've scared all of
this fucking talent back to China. If
youlook at the guys who are doing this,
they used to We rk for Wester n pharma
giants, or they we: e running a top unt
versity department somewhere

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 08/08/2026

As a rising power, China is following a historical precedent: mastering emerging technologies. As a declining power, the United States is following historical precedent: embracing fossil fuels and military dominance. "Superpower suicide and its most basic form." Rush Doshi and Timothy Snyder [1/2]

Rush Doshi, a professor at George
town and a China specialist at the Coun-
cil on Foreign Relations, sees in Trump's
pursuit of territorial control a recurring
historical error. In the eighteenth cen-
tury, while Russia fixated on conquer-
ing Eurasia, Britain developed the steam
engine; in the nineteenth and twent:-
eth centuries, while Europeans fought
over Africa, Americans mastered the
assembly line. Today, while the U.S. tries
to govern Venezuela and hobble Iran
and Cuba, “China is focussed on win-
ning the technologies of the future,”
Doshi said. If the U.S. were to lose the
competition over the next wave of in-
dustries—including A.l, biotech, and
robotics—as it lost the ones over solar
panels, batteries, and electric vehicles,
“it would irreversibly change the bal-
ance of power.”

For China, America’s retreat comes
just as decades of state investment, in-
dustrial policy, and diplomatic planning
are paying off. It would be foolhardy to
entirely trust China's official statistics;
as the economist Gao Shanwen once
told an audience in D.C., the official
growth rate “will always be around five
per cent.” But the change is plainly vis-
ible. In two decades, China has gone
from producing about half as much elec-
tricity as the U.S. to generating more
than twice as much, at far lower prices;
in 2023, it installed more solar power
than America has installed in its entire
history. Meanwhile, Trump reémbraced
fossil fuels, in what the historian Tim-
othy Snyder called “superpower suicide
in perhaps the most basic form.”

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 07/08/2026

German car designers understand that Americans are currently drawn to ready to pay for the "angry with a funny mustache" aesthetic.

White BMW i4 front view. Headlights squint towards a pair of black panels in the center, intended to evoke air intake grills, which are not needed on an EV, but which do look like a funny mustache.

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 05/08/2026

I need to get up here more often.

My bike aside the rainbow bench in memory of Millie Hughes-Fulford. It's on the San Francisco Bay with the Moffitt hanger and NASA Ames and Google HQ in the background.

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 05/08/2026

Pro tip: in satisfaction surveys, try to call out the good stuff!

Rate your conversation: slightly frowing face

Comment: you folks have bad data that messes up my use of the app but at least you told me to fuck off about it quickly

Submit

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 04/08/2026

Young people think AI is cringe and it makes you dumb and it makes you look dumb. via The Week August 7, 2026

The generation
that Al can’t impress
“Some kids will never think
Al is cool,” said Elana Klein
in Wired. In fact, the hottest
take among the youngest
cohort, so-called Genera-
tion Alpha, is to reject Al
entirely. While adoption
rates are high—particularly
for “school assignments
and companionship”—37%
of teens now “cringe when
they see Al content like
music and videos,” and
over a quarter believe
artificial intelligence “will
have a negative impact
on society in the next
20 years.” Many of them
cited job losses, environ-
mental concerns, and “the
decline of critical-thinking
skills.” Some students
have started calling
people “dumb for using
it” instead of using their
own intelligence. New
generations typically
“adopt new consumer
technology eagerly.” But
this demographic doesn't
care for the way that Al is
being pushed on them by
adults and tech compa-
nies. Melanie Green, a
communications professor
at SUNY Buffalo, said they
are also “acutely aware
that whatever disruption
happens, their generation
is going to be bearing the
brunt of it.”

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 30/07/2026

I just hope my local newspaper has enough resources that someone is around to have a mild "undo panic" over publishing this headline.

The headline reads "data centers face undue panic about mild resource impacts"

But they used the word undo: u n d o where I believe they really wanted to use undue: u n d u e

There is plenty about our current situation that I would love to undo.

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 28/07/2026

The San Francisco Bay Area has long been infamous for its NIMBYism blocking new housing. Now NIMBY tactics are being leveraged against the world's most loathed property developer. And his fucking would-be ICE facility in Gilroy. Nick Bhasin in today's Merc.

The headline reads finally nibby tactics being used for a worthy cause.

Local governments are using the national environmental policy Act as well as the administrative procedure act against the federal government.

There is also the intergovernmental cooperation Act which requires the federal government to work with local governments before building something like an ice facility.

It is thrilling to watch the nimby smoke screen being used for good instead of evil.

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 28/07/2026

Sunnyvale at risk of losing "appearance of poultry farm" at 434 Crescent Ave. (Neighbors ARE concerned with 3-story townhomes being built.)

Neighborhood Impact

* Site will no longer provide appearance as poultry farm

* 434 Crescent Ave will maintain visible presence and heritage resource will be continue to be enjoyed

* Proposed townhouse buildings will be similar height and density to surrounding multi-family developments

* Sufficient separation and landscaping will be maintained around heritage resource to preserve integrity

City Hall: Councll Chambers

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 21/07/2026

Local utility box about sums it up.

There is a graffito of a depressed looking puffball next to a sticker that reads "SUPERBOWL LX CHINGA LA MIGRA"

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 19/07/2026

My view of the Spanish goal on Telemundo via Peacock.

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 17/07/2026

I'm with Karen. (via The New Yorker, July 20, 2026)

AT A PRICE

It was hard for me to read Melanie Thern-
strom’s piece about fabulously wealthy
women spending thousands of dollars on
a gynecologist who coaches them on op-
timizing their orgasms, because it arrived
the same week that my towns small com-
munity hospital, in southeastern Ver-
mont, announced that it anticipates hav-

ing to close its birthing center this year
(“Billionaires’ Vagina Club,” July 6th &
13th). If that comes to pass, then many
women will have to travel out of state,

often across long distances, for obstetric

care. This week, I also read that the av-

erage annual compensation fora C.E.O.

of a major national health-insurance com-

pany is more than twenty million dollars.

I also encountered a poll, no doubt insti-

tuted to mark our nation’s two-hundred-

and-fiftieth birthday, asking: Are you

proud to be an American? I'm thinking

about how proud I would be if our coun-

try made serious strides to eliminate this

level of economic injustice.

Karen Tyler

Brattleboro, Vi.

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 16/07/2026

I love Little Free Libraries. We have a lot of them around where I live. I don't give one take one; What I do is when I see one, I'll look inside and if I see something good I'll grab it. [1/3]

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 15/07/2026

An update! * reads what's new Ah! Yeah. Uh thanks Google but I'm good.

Your Pixel is getting even better with the latest features
and enhancements along with Android 17.

Learn more at our Community page.

What's new?

With Screen reactions, you can now record a selfie
video overlay while capturing what's on your screen, all
without needing extra apps.|1]

*Gemini Omni makes creating and editing videos as
easy as having a conversation. Blend text, images, and
videos to bring your ideas to life.12]

Describe an idea or upload a photo, and it'll be
transformed into a high-quality audio track with lyrics
in Gemini.[3!

«Easily turn your apps into floating bubbles over your
main screen to check them quickly or multitask without
disrupting your flow. [4]

1 Screen reactions are only available when screen recording is set to
record the entire screen.

Download and install

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 07/07/2026

Not much point to watching the game; If we score fewer goals then Belgium there will be a call placed to FIFA to count the goals again.

Balogun holds up a picture of Donald Trump to a ref who is holding up a red card.

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 05/07/2026

CW: Oligarchy Optimizing Orgasm Private Equity has come for the Clitoris

New Yorker clipping

BRAVE NEW WORLD DEPT.
BILLIONAIRES VAGINA CLUB

Dr. Sally Greenwald optimizes orgasms for the women of Silicon Valley.

BY MELANIE THERNSTROM

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 01/07/2026

Big USA game today. I am wearing my most patriotic socks!

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 30/06/2026

CW: Finding Nemo This clownfish hole is getting deeper.

Lents opens with the example of
clown fish, of “Finding Nemo” fame.
Clown fish, which hide out among the
tentacles of sea anemones, live together
in tight-knit, highly regimented groups
known as queues. Every queue has ex-
actly one female, who is the biggest fish
in the group and runs the show. Next
in line is her mate. He’s the second-
largest fish and the group's only sexu-
ally mature male. The rest of the fish
are stuck, Peter Pan-like, in a state of
arrested development. If a queue loses
its female, it rearranges itself. Her part-
ner undergoes a sex change and takes
on the role of the breeding female. His
position is assumed, in turn, by the larg-
est of the immature fish, who, thanks
to the tragedy, finally gets to grow up.
Were “Finding Nemo” true to life, when
Nemo’s mother is eaten by a barracuda,
his father, Marlin, would begin to tran-
sition. By the time Marlin and Nemo
are, at long last, reunited, the change
would be complete, and, in the absence
of a larger male, Nemo would mate with
his now-female father. “It’s probably a
good thing that Pixar wasn't striving
for biological accuracy,” Lents observes.

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 30/06/2026

CW: Copulating in bat guano From the New Yorker.

Neotrogla is a genus of bark lice native
to Brazil. The lice live in dry caves
and feed predominantly on bat guano.
Male Neotrogla produce capsules of
sperm, known as spermatophores, which
also contain a protein-rich fluid. Even
for a louse, it’s tough to make a go of it
off bat shit. And so female Veozrogla have
evolved a penis-like appendage, which
they poke into their mates and use, like
a straw, to suck up spermatophores,
thereby combining sex and snacking.
There is so much competition for
spermatophores among females, Sun
reports, that it “often leaves males with
little time between copulations.”

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 17/06/2026

"Dear Google AI, please generate an image of what an enshittified app store UI would look like. Thanks!"

Search for "Microsoft authenticator" puts a sponsored, lower-ranked ad-encrusted third party app above the actual result that anyone would actually want.

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 17/06/2026

Dude just wants his rug back, man.

Also up for sale are the
two rugs that are essen-
tial to the plot of “The
Big Lebowski,” including
the rug belonging to Jeff
Bridges’ the Dude that is
soiled at the beginning of
the 1998 film that “really
tied the room together.”
Bidding on them opens at
$15.000 apiece.

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 17/06/2026

I prefer bicycling mixed with train. But in 2015 I bought a brand new Nissan Leaf for $15k and that car continues to be wonderful.

NYT having "how much money are EV drivers saving" with a graphic that shows gas cost up $3.67 and EV up $0.42.

No I do not have a subscription so I'm sharing a preview image.

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 12/06/2026

For whatever it's worth, Google's AI agrees that Google's UI sucks because there's a bunch of people at Google that don't talk to each other. Google's AI is also of the opinion that it will get better as Google's AI replaces those siloed teams of humans and takes over the software development.

Gemini 3.5Flash

It is definitely a "big tech company" disease. When a
company gets as massive as Google, teams become
siloed. The team building the Android operating
system, the team building the Google Search app, and
the team building Gemini are completely different
departments. They often compete for resources and
screen space rather than cooperating.
As for me? | am Gemini. I'm the Al model running
under the hood. | don't design the Android menus or
the nested settings cogs—I just process the text and
try to give you straight answers.
There isa push across the industry to use Al to clean
up these messy menus so you can just tell your phone
"change my power button settings" and it does it,
rather than making you hunt through three layers of
cogs. But until that's fully baked, the interface is going
to stay a bit of a chaotic patchwork. You aren't hoping
for too much; it really shouldn't be this messy.

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Daniel Howard @dannyman.toldme.com · 11/06/2026

Good call ecobee! I was just thinking to drop the thermostat manually and then turn it back up at 3:00 p.m.. I like it when the appliances are smart enough that I don't have to intervene.

Cooling home before peak hours

eco+ is using less energy during the hours when
electricity is more expensive, to help save you money.

Cooling to 62°F - 71°F until 3:00 PM

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